The reason a worker today is paid more than 100 years ago is, essentially, just that they can produce/transact with more people at once.
A nurse "should" be paid what they were 100 years ago, as the number of transactions hasn't changed. The only reason they aren't is due to competition from productive sectors.
But those productive sectors need to exist! In a world where many people are doing such low-productivity jobs, everyone will be much poorer.
A director of marketing creates a campaign which affects millions of transactions... so it's a function which can dramatically increase economic production.
It's pretty easy to compare productivity across industries. Leave what "should" be aside, when you're planning for the success of nations you cannot rely on Moral Bonuses.
The rate of economic activity (ie., people transacting with one another such that each has more than before) is measurable: it's called growth.
And you cannot grow by replacing highly productive industries with deeply unproductive ones. To pay for things we need the ratio of workers:transactions to increase.
Human history was severely impoverished because this was always a low number. We are wealthy today only because it is a higher one.
Human health is also a component of that inequation. How are you factoring that in with profit?
Also, all of that growth is meaningless unless it somehow makes people healthier and happier. So I would say that having a huge and successful healthcare industry is one of the goals of the rest of the economy (as are food production, entertainment, knowledge production and others).
So, if we have enough wealth but not enough healthcare, food, fun or knowledge, than we can trade some of that wealth for more important things, like healthcare workers, or garbage collection, or agricultural work, or mathematics research, etc. Or child care, though I suppose you view stay-at-home parents as deeply unproductive by this measure.
Capitalism is the greatest force in history for increases in human wealth, happiness, abundance, etc., ie., for growth
Consider any metric of interest over the last century, and esp. the last 40 years: https://ourworldindata.org/
Also, capitalism without explicit social goals imposed by a state is disastrous. Just look at the USA, with one of the worse and most expensive Healthcare systems out of the developed world, despite having by far the largest GDP (the only fully capitalist-run Healthcare system in the world!).
All of this is not to mention that capitalism is rapidly destroying our planet, with global warming, deforestation,river polution, oil spills, air pollution and other woes being fought for tooth-and-nail by most large companies.
Child mortality rates and mortality rates in childbirth have been c. 20% for most of human history, up until c. 1940.
Almost all human beings for almost all recent history have been agricultural works (over 90% in 1800) which is a severe and precarious state.
If you wish to go before settlements into nomadic hunters and gatherers note that this cannot produce "mathematical research, healthcare, etc." -- ie., the desirable things stated.
At this point you're just pining to be a dog. You may prefer a shorter, more brutal, more violent life... but I think, rather, you just need a fantasy of a utopian "before time" to justify you enmity towards the status quo.
> how some can claim Capitalism is the important factor here.
Err... when do you think they started their massive reductions in poverty?
When they stopped blaming various other people an liberalized their markets (in china "The Capitalists" and in India "The British Empire"). Within a few years of introducing captialist reforms these societies dramatically reduced poverty.
Intuitively, "pay according to productivity" makes sense, but productivity gains have far outpaced the pay of workers while the money went elsewhere. Let's face the reality that productivity prescribes the total sum that goes around but not how each individual's contribution is credited in a society.
Is that not true? Carnegie and Rockefeller were even relatively richer than the CEOs are today, and I'm sure their lawyers were compensated for as well as today's richest lawyers as well.
The only period of relatively more equality was post-WW2. Inequality then, as ever, has only been reduced by mass death -- either in the form of wars, or plagues, famines etc.
The mechanism of wealth acquisition, ie., investment /(preferential attachment), necessarily iterates towards increasing levels of inequality.
Your productivity is your effect on net increases in economic transactions. A CEO has a massive effect. Jeff Bezos can literally, right now, change the GDP of entire countries just by making a decision.
One minute of his time can raise or lower a country's economic activity.
> while the money went elsewhere
Did it? Productivity increases is still the reason people have rising wages.
That we don't see the 1:1 wage:productivity increases we used to (post-WW2), doesnt mean that productivity isnt still the key metric to be increasing.
As to why that is probably the form automation takes today has a lot to do with it, ie., that innovations in factories used to increase the productivity of working class people; now such increases accumulate to highly skilled workers.
Ironically, I think this makes my point: our economy has become politically unstable because of the relative increase of low-productivity labour. This would get much worse with people transitioning to care work.
As the traditional factory job disappears more and more, the aging population will provide a huge source of new caring/support jobs. We'll have to find a way to pay them a living wage, but then we had that problem with factory jobs in the early industrial revolution too.